“This is Charles,” he said again. “Can I help you?”
“Okay,” a man’s voice said finally. “Okay. Bran’s son. I remember. Is Bran there? I need to talk to the Marrok.”
“Bran is gone,” Charles told him. “I’m in charge while he is out of town. How can I help you?”
“Bran is gone,” repeated the man’s voice. It was unfamiliar, but the accent was Celtic. “Charles.” He paused. “I need . . . we need you to come up here. There’s been an incident.” And then he hung up without leaving his name or where exactly “up here” was. When Charles tried calling him back, no one picked up the phone. Charles wrote down the number and strode out, looking for his stepmother.
He hadn’t recognized the voice, and if one of the pack members had been in trouble, he’d have felt it. There was another group of wolves who lived in Aspen Creek, Montana, though they were not part of the Marrok’s pack: the wolves Bran deemed too damaged or too dangerous to function as part of a pack—even the Aspen Creek Pack, which was full of damaged and dangerous wolves.
Those wolves, mostly, belonged to the Marrok alone. Not a separate pack, really, but bound to the Marrok’s will and magic by blood and flesh. “Wildlings,” Bran called them. Some of the pack called them things less flattering, and possibly more accurate, though no one called them the Walking Dead in front of Charles’s father.
The wildlings lived in the mountains, separate from everyone, their homes and territory protected by the pack because it was in everyone’s best interest for no one to intrude in what peace they could find.
Bran had given him the usual list of names and a map with locations marked. Most of them Charles had met, though there were two wolves he knew only by reputation. The wildlings were, as a whole, both dangerous and fragile. Bran did not lightly allow anyone else to interact with them.
The list had not included phone numbers.
He found Leah with Anna in the stainless-steel-and-cherry kitchen. Anna had her back to Leah, whose face was flushed. His Anna was mixing something—he could smell chocolate and orange—and paying the Marrok’s mate no attention at all. He recognized Anna’s tactic for dealing with people she felt were too irrational to discuss anything with. She’d used it on him often enough.
Leah was tall, even for the current era, when women of five-eight or -nine were more common. She was several decades older than Charles, and in the eighteenth century, when she’d been born, she would have looked like a Nordic giant goddess. Her natural build was athletic, an effect enhanced by a life spent running in the woods. Her features were even and topped by large blue eyes the color of a summer lake at noon.
His Anna was, as she liked to say, average-average. Average height, average build, average looks. Her curly hair was a few shades darker and a hint redder than Leah’s dark blond. Anna considered her hair to be her best feature. Charles loved her freckles and her warm brown eyes that lightened to blue when her wolf was close.
Objectively, Leah was far more beautiful. But his Anna was real in a way few people were. He’d tried explaining that realness to his da once, and his da had finally shook his head, and said, “Son, I think that’s one of those things that your mother would have understood without trouble, and I never will.”
Anna connected to the world around her as if she instinctively understood his maternal grandfather’s view of the world: that all things in the world are a part of a greater whole, that harm to one thing was harm to all. She had coherence with the world around her, while most people were fighting to be connected to as little as possible because that was safer. He thought Anna was the bravest person he knew.
He understood that other people would consider Leah the more beautiful of the two. He even understood why. But to him, Anna was—
Ours, said Brother Wolf. She is perfect, our soul mate, our anchor, the reason we were created. So that we could be hers. But we have other business to attend to.
He didn’t know how long the silence between the two women had held—it hadn’t been that long since Leah had stormed out of his office. His father’s office.
“Leah,” he said, because there was no time to wade into the deep waters between the two women even if he’d been stupid enough to want to do so. “I just received a distress call from one of the wildlings, I think. Do you know this phone number?”
He held the paper out to her.
Leah demonstrated one of her shining qualities. She dropped whatever fight she was trying to pick with Anna and took the paper he handed her, setting aside her personal business without hesitation when duty called.
“Hester and Jonesy,” she said immediately. “They live up Arsonist Creek about twenty miles. What did she say?”
And that was why he hadn’t recognized the voice. Jonesy very seldom spoke when his mate was available to do it. Hester . . . Hester was old. In that category of old that meant neither she nor anyone else was entirely sure how old she was.
“Jonesy called me,” Charles said. “He said there’s been an incident, and he wanted me to come to them.”
“Has been an incident?” Leah frowned, glanced over her shoulder at Charles’s mate, and frowned harder. “Hester isn’t easy even for Bran. The last time he went up—last fall—she was lucid and seemed to enjoy singing with him. But then she tracked him halfway back to the road, and he had to call Jonesy to lure her back to her home. If there has been an incident, having an Omega wolf there might be a good move for everyone.”
Charles frowned. “An Omega wolf isn’t always a good thing when dealing with the wildlings.”
Initially, Bran had been very excited about what Anna might do for his wildlings. And she’d helped a couple of them. But one spectacular disaster that ended with the wildling dead and three of the pack damaged had taught them to be cautious. That the wildling had been under a death sentence before Anna tried to help him hadn’t kept her from feeling terrible.
Charles was unwilling to expose Anna to such trauma again. He and his da had had several heated arguments about that recently— arguments that both of them were careful to keep from Anna.
“Tracked?” Anna asked, taking a spoon and sinking it into her bowl.
Leah nodded. As long as the topic was important, her voice stayed professionally brisk. “She took wolf form and tracked Bran as if he were prey. He said he wasn’t sure he shouldn’t have let her catch up with him.” Leah’s brisk voice traveled right over what that would have meant: Hester’s death. “But she’d been lucid for the better part of two days—and Jonesy seemed well enough. Bran thought it could have been just having a dominant wolf in her territory that had set her off, so he let it lie.”
She pursed her lips, and said, “You aren’t your father. Hester might not be willing to let you approach her at all by yourself. Unless you want to have to put Hester down, you should take Anna.” She saw Charles’s hesitation. “Unlike the wildling who had such a bad reaction to Anna, Hester’s personality is a strong one. It is her wolf that is her problem—not the human half.” She gave a little biting laugh at his expression. “You can ask your da, that was his assessment.”